Office recycling and the data breach risk to UAE companies
Shred-It has played a major role in the organizing industry for as long as I can remember. Established in Canada, they now have offices throughout the United States and globally, including the UAE. Today I’m pleased to welcome Jenny Green from Shred-It, as my guest, with some tips to help you with office recycling and shredding. A recent Gulf News article highlighted that companies in the UAE are getting very good at recycling waste paper; however there’s still surprisingly little focus on information security in the document disposal process.If you have a recycling bin in your office, take a look at the documents inside it. What information can you see? Customer details? Employee information? Company-sensitive data - maybe reports, memos or spreadsheets?Would you want criminals, your competitors or the general public to see this kind of information? With fraud, identity theft and corporate espionage on the rise globally – the answer is most likely “No!”
The problem is that once a piece of paper is no longer needed, the tendency is to think of it as ‘waste’ and just throw it in the waste or recycling bin. However the information on that piece of paper could still be highly confidential.The UAE currently only has a recycling plant for cardboard, where any office paper for recycling is hand-sorted into different grades for export overseas. Here, large volumes of documents from UAE companies are becoming an international commodity, and being exported to feed the manufacture of recycled products around the world – particularly India and China.What happens to the information in those documents along the way? The reality is that tonnes of sensitive documents are left lying around in open paper dumps with readable information still on them. And who knows who might have access to that information.
While cybercrimes are often highlighted in the media as the cause of data breach incidents, serious information security problems are also caused by a lack of physical safeguards to protect confidential paper documents being in place.It is commonplace for companies to have a paper recycling programme – after all, we know it’s good for the environment. However it’s also important that all confidential paper documents be securely shredded before being recycled.To keep things simple and secure, many Shred-it customers simply implement a ‘shred-all’ policy where all waste paper is shredded. After all, the end result is that it’s all recycled anyway so why confuse things with separate paper shredding and recycling bins cluttering up the office?
To see Shred-it’s secure paper shredding and recycling service in action, you can watch this brief video.
For a free Data Security Survey of your office - where one of our security experts will help you identify data security risk in your workplace, and provide advice on what to do about it - contact us now.
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